


an itemized list of thirty years

by scioscribe



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Bisexuality, Bittersweet, F/M, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, M/M, Melancholy, Old Friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 10:19:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5662729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Burr is the preface to his story; the prefix to every noun and verb that comes after.</p><p>  <i>See also: grammar.  Talk less.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	an itemized list of thirty years

**Author's Note:**

> Bits and pieces of pairings: Hamilton/Eliza, Hamilton/Laurens, Hamilton/Angelica, and some one-sided Hamilton/Burr.

Burr is the first domino to fall. Hamilton reaches out, takes his hand, and knocks the rest of his life into position: Laurens, Mulligan, Lafayette, Washington, Angelica, Eliza. All of this, because Aaron Burr felt Alexander Hamilton’s chapped hands, eyed the ragged edges of his coat, took him out of the cold, and bought him a drink? Burr is the preface to his story; the prefix to every noun and verb that comes after.

_See also: grammar. Talk less._

It’s half past ten when he hammers on Burr’s door, drunk and enraptured as a schoolboy: “Burr, Burr, yo, Burr, come and help me write _The Federalist Papers_!” All of this with no context. Burr makes him tea and refuses him sugar. Hamilton feels like he hasn’t blinked in hours. He fills Burr in on the details the next night, when his hands still won’t lie flat on the table.

_See also: legal matters._

Angelica wrinkles her nose. “He told me about his money.”

Money, to Hamilton, seems a perfectly respectable reason to marry someone.

“If you were a woman, would you marry Burr?”

“If I were a woman, dear, I’d be you.” And he would marry himself. He does not go so far as to say that, but he implies it: her hands move restlessly and she bites her lower lip. Eliza is across the garden; Hamilton is the lip between Angelica’s teeth. He will tell Eliza about this moment later, almost.

_See also: cockblocking. Infidelity. She’s married to a British officer._

Hamilton holds Theodosia. She’s three months of struggling wetness and she punches him in the mouth with one tiny fist.

He likes that Burr confesses often and unequivocally to his love for his daughter. He likes less that Burr praises her for the accuracy of the punch: “Oh, yeah, little sweetheart, that’s the way to shut him up.”

“I need ice,” Hamilton whines. “I can’t go into court with a fat lip from your infant pugilist offspring.”

“Don’t be such a child,” Burr says. “Tell everyone it’s a war wound.”

“This famous split lip? Musket-fire. You weren’t there, man, you couldn’t understand! --Yeah, Burr, I don’t think anyone’s going to buy that.”

“Say Laurens shot—” Burr quiets. He thrusts his daughter back at Hamilton. “Here,” he says, abruptly, as if this is consolation for loss: one human body for another. Hamilton puts his finger in the delicate clutch of her hand. She holds onto him, more persistent than he would have thought. Like father, like daughter. He has never met Laurens’s little girl.

_See also: if I could trade his life for mine, he’d be standing here right now. Phillip Hamilton. Burr’s reasons to live. Laurens, I like you a lot._

It’s 1790 and Burr just _will not let it go_ about this dinner, like, he’s down to wanting to know what fork Jefferson picked up first and how Madison shook out his napkin and if Hamilton had cause to lick his fingers afterwards, and Hamilton is done with it. Even being plied with drinks, he’s done with it. He is sick to death of describing the taste of the wine.

“We lived through _cannon-fire_ and this is what gets your heart racing?”

“Cannon-fire is obvious,” Burr says dismissively.

“Cannon-fire is _obvious_ ,” Hamilton said. “Okay. Not the defining feature of it for me, but okay. Did I ever tell you—”

“—you stole cannons from the British. Yes. Many, many times. Who talked first? Who said what?”

“We all talked about you,” Hamilton deadpanned. “Jefferson is thinking of getting a fade.”

But in the end he caves, because Burr is aglow, and if Hamilton had another glass of wine, he would even think Burr was beautiful like that—the cream of his cuff peeking out of his jacket sleeve, the bright umber of his gesturing hands and the pink pearl of his fingernails, the light coming off his glass in rainbows as he turns it. This is a dangerous way to think: there’s already Maria, and the secret of it, the pain it would cause Eliza, is like a dry rot inside him. And Burr is Burr.

But for right now, all Hamilton has to do is talk, so he talks, and delights in being coy, like he’s Martha Washington’s cat dragging a mouse just out of Burr’s reach. He senses, instinctively, the allure of demurring at certain points. Of smiling more.

_See also: I can’t believe we’re here with him. Censored letters. No one else was in the room where it happened._

Burr is outside his door with a grimace and a copy of _The Independent Journal_. Without even a “good morning,” he starts reading off an essay.

“Hey,” Hamilton says, pleased. “That one’s mine. No, don’t stop!”

“You want me to read you to yourself?”

Hamilton shrugs. “Eliza won’t do it either.”

Burr folds the paper with a brisk snap. He’s angry about something, but Hamilton can’t tell what. “Do you write in your sleep? That must be a troubling prospect for your wife.”

Are they fighting, and if so, about what? Does Burr fight, even?

“Ask her yourself,” Hamilton says, deciding for once that discretion really is the better part of valor, and making a note to write smug letters to Washington and Lafayette to this effect. “Come inside and have some breakfast with us—there’s still toast that won’t have gone cold.”

“Appetizing,” Burr says dryly, but he follows Hamilton back inside the house.

It is, Hamilton thinks, a strange way to be at home, with the morning sun reddening the windowpanes, with them all lazing even though the day is speeding towards noon. Eliza is embarrassed to still be in her plainest morning dress and keeps tugging her chemisette around her shoulders, but Burr draws her out, and soon she talks animatedly and lets the draped cloth sag. Burr evinces a preference for a type of jam, which Hamilton gleefully spins out into an entire political philosophy, the unfounded nature of which is protested in a lively vein by both wife and friend until at last Burr gives up and smiles, his mouth shiny with butter.

And Phillip is on Hamilton’s knee, examining the difference between the length of his hair—pulled out as straight as he can—and the length of his father’s. He has a scientist’s curiosity.

Pause it here, just for a second. Is this what he fought the war for, or was it something else? At the moment, he’s content with this answer.

_See also: Domestic life. We oughta give it a try._

When Burr taunts him with that Caribbean accent, tells him to run back to St. Croix, there is no shame in his face at all. And suddenly there’s no one in the room but the two of them—no Jefferson, no Madison, no specters of James and Maria Reynolds—and all Hamilton can see are shades of red and black, as if this hate will make him blind.

_I never knew you hated me. I never knew I hated you._

It was Burr, in his earliest days in New York, who took away what was left of Hamilton’s accent, who clipped his vowels and weeded his speech like a man making a topiary; Lafayette and Mulligan couldn’t help him and Laurens was too reluctant to, so it was Burr who stayed up late with him, talking and correcting until their lips were numb and even Hamilton’s tongue felt stiff and ungainly in his mouth. He can’t even remember what he used to sound like; the real voices of the West Indies have gotten overwritten in his mind by the mockery of them. He doesn’t know if he told Burr this, but he can’t recall his mother’s voice any longer.

Burr is inseparable from those nights of cracked voices and patience.

(“I need people to understand me, I’ve got so many things to tell them.”

Laurens frowns. “People can already understand you. I can always understand you.”

“You understood me before I ever opened my mouth.”

“Alex. There was never a time before you opened your mouth.”

He leans in and rests his forehead against John’s. “I’m gonna be someone no one can deny,” he says, both because it’s the truth and because it’s a way to end the argument, because he can already tell what John is readying himself to say.)

So he can’t bring Burr to mind without this tangle of tongues, lips, teeth, voices, sound. This is the first time he has ever wanted Burr to shut up.

_See also: respectability. Xenophobia. Talk less._

He writes back to Burr and provides him with a thorough summary of all their quarrels. By the end of it, his head and hand both hurt. Eliza kisses the knuckles of his thumb and first finger: “Who has you upset? So prolific?”

“Our new vice president.” Out of spite, he adds, “You’ll recall the man who ousted your father from the Senate.”

She registers disdain, and no one, he thinks wistfully, registers disdain better than his Eliza: she throws shutters across the kindness in her eyes and her whole being implies disappointment. This has all so recently, and with far better cause, been how she looked at him, that he feels strangely inclined to defend Burr. It is one thing to duel; another to let a man catch frostbite at much more than ten paces because Eliza Schuyler Hamilton is onto him.

“You might also remember him from my law days. He came for breakfast. We ate toast.”

“He liked the black butter jam,” she says, her face wrinkling up. “You deduced from it a fondness for oligarchy. He seemed so amiable.”

“That’s usually what he’s best at.”

“Strange,” Eliza says. She’s still holding his hand in hers. He will never grow tired of that sensation.

“What, dear?”

“That God would put such gentleness and avarice together in one man.”

He smiles. “I wouldn’t hang too much moral weight on a man’s fondness for your jam, good though it is.” He hadn’t remembered Burr’s preference, and he’s glad, now, that it was not Phillip’s own favorite. Their grief is still something they can trip on, like frayed carpeting. He waggles his eyebrows, trying to make an innuendo out of it all, but she ignores him.

Though she still does not let go.

“Nevertheless,” she says. “Strange.”

_See also: can you imagine?_

“I was so young when I met you,” he says to Burr.

“We were both young.”

“You were never young,” he says back, meaning to tease.

But Burr only says, “Neither of us were.”

_See also: dying is easy, living is harder._

The sun is in his eyes. He asks for his glasses and puts them on.

There: his sight is clear now, and he is confident. He is not aiming at Burr, but he is looking at Burr, through the glass and down the telescope of all that time:

 _Ah_ , he thinks, _I’d know you anywhere._


End file.
